TRADITIONAL media will not die at the hands of upstart technologies but must adjust to meet the challenge, the telecoms regulator said last night.

“People often say that the rise of the internet means that traditional mediums, like radio, will die,” Ed Richards, chief operating officer of Ofcom, said. “This is not true. We are seeing an adjustment as a new medium, the internet, becomes more and more significant in people’s lives.

“Other media just has to adjust in response, as many of them have been doing.”

Mr Richards’s comments came as Ofcom’s latest annual communications market report showed that while older consumers were starting to embrace new technology, young people were neglecting television, magazines and radio in favour of the internet, mobile phones and MP3 players.

Ofcom said that, in 2005, the proportion of time spent by all viewers watching BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, Channel 4 and Five has fallen from 80 per cent to 70 per cent. Young people are watching an hour less television a day compared with the average viewer.

In radio, Ofcom said, revenues have shrunk 1.7 per cent, driven by falling commercial income. The sector that has suffered the most has been local commercial radio.

In the five years to the end of the first quarter of 2006, local commercial radio stations have been affected by increasing competition from national stations as well as other media, with listening hours falling by 14 per cent.

Ofcom said that traditional media advertising is also starting to be surpassed by internet advertising, with online advertising revenue now three times greater than radio advertising revenue and one third that of television advertising revenue.

In television, Mr Richards said, this was not all bad news for traditional broadcasters since their digital spin-off channels, such as BBC3 and ITV2, were picking up viewers moving to multichannel television. Ofcom found that digital television penetration broke the 70 per cent barrier in early 2006. However, Mr Richards acknowledged that “it is not such a perfect picture” and these channels still provide a small percentage of the broadcasters’ revenues.

Mr Richards said that public service broadcasters would need to move to the online world as consumer habits changed.

In radio, he said, the new digital radio spectrum set to be auctioned by Ofcom would aid growth of the commercial radio sector. Podcasting could also boost radio listening, especially among young people who are deserting the medium. Ofcom found digital radio take-up had risen in the past year, with over 1.5 million sets sold in 2005, up by half on the previous year.

About 21 per cent of young people said they read magazines less because of time on the internet and 27 per cent said they read national newspapers less.

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